[hn_]

A syllabus is not a contract. It can be changed unilaterally at any time and is no way legally enforceable.

"The court finds no legal support for treating a course syllabus as a contract. The few courts that have considered the issue have concluded that a syllabus does not constitute a contract....Indeed, a valid contract requires several elements, including mutual agreement and valuable consideration....A course syllabus — which commonly outlines reading requirements, test dates and the like — does not have any such attributes." Gabriel v. Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences – Vermont Campus

"[A syllabus] does not contractually obligate the college but instead, is a variable metric devised by the individual course instructor." - Miller v. MacMurray College

"There is no contract between a professor or instructor and a student created by the syllabus or university guidelines. A professor or instructor’s failure to abide by the syllabus or university guidelines will be actionable only under the same circumstances that any other academic evaluation decision is justiciable: that is when the conduct is alleged to be arbitrary or capricious or to constitute bad faith" - Collins v. Grier

[ejcx]

That's crazy interesting and now I have some reading to do. I still view the grading scale as a something that should not change, however.

I'm not surprised a syllabus is not a contract but I do think that most universities, when presented with a situation like this, have it in their interest to honor the syllabus.

[hn_]

Grading scales can and do change depending on circumstances of how the class goes. If a majority of the students do poorly on a quiz worth 20% of your grade, the professor may choose to bump that down to 10% and give a second quiz worth 10%. Perhaps because some students complained the quiz was a poor reflection of what was actually learned. Professors require flexibility to deal with things that happen as the class progresses. A Syllabus is just a basic outline. Seriously - if a test was scheduled on a day where there was a fire in the building and class was cancelled what is the professor supposed to do if he/she can't venture outside of the syllabus?

Universities do not create syllabi, individual professors do for individual classes. Some universities don't even require a professor to give one to their students. I don't see how a syllabus is even really relevant here at all because (University wide) student honor/conduct codes and the like are what actually applies here.

Courts generally stay out of grading disputes (for good reason!)

"University faculties must have the widest range of discretion in making judgments as to the academic performance of students and their entitlement to promotion or graduation." - Board of Curators of the University of Missouri v. Horowitz (Supreme Court)

Not only that the probability of this going to court is zero - the university provided a replacement professor to assign grades instead of failing the class.

I also read about this in another paper this morning and it said that the university had assigned security to this class previously due to its behavior.

[fluidcruft]

Professors are often advised to pretend the syllabus is a contract because doing so sets expectations and can avoid annoying petty hassles at the end of the term when students that feel slighted and desperate start abusing administrative procedures (i.e. it reduces perfunctory pointless busy work that will waste the professor's time because admin will always find a way to fall for egregious student bullshit).

Generally, professors should try to find a balance that sets the syllabus to be difficult but still doable--difficult enough that students don't blow off the work, but also not so difficult as to frighten them away and cause them to drop in the first few weeks. Plus you can always move the grading scale down later which makes the students quite happy later in the term. Failing someone because they didn't muster up to this sort of syllabus is more "difficult" for the administration to roll over.

"Difficult" in the sense that admin will maybe, possibly sense a vague pang of internal conflict and disease (assuming they still have any sense of agency whatsoever) while rubberstamping the override.